Creating and investigating other knowledges: Artistic Research in the Humanities
Cultural Transformations Summer Seminar 2024

Presenters : Meghna Singh, Oda-Kange Midtvåge Diallo, Marie Koldkjær Højlund, Neelakantan Keshavan.

Thursday 13 June 2024, 13.30-17.00
Nobelparken, Building 1485, Room 123 (Nobelsalen), Jens Chr. Skous Vej 2, 8000 Aarhus C

The summer seminar will also in this year continue in a neighbouring garden with food, wine, beer, soft drinks and hopefully plenty of sun and warm breezes (address Ny Tjørnegade 24, 8200 Aarhus N, a 5-7 minutes walk from the seminar venue uphill). Everybody is welcome to the Summer Seminar and Party, but please register Here. No later than Tuesday 4 June 2024, at 09:00

Questions, please contact Cultural Transformations (programme directors).

PROGRAM
 

13.30-14.30:

• Meghna Singh: Mediating trade, transnationalism, migration & racial slavery via observational     filmmaking and the creation of public art installations in Cape Town, South Africa
• Oda-Kange Midtvåge Diallo: Joining in black Nordic study: theories, practices, relationships

14.30-15.00:
Coffee break outside

15.00-16.00: 

• Marie Koldkjær Højlund: Designing for sonic citizenship through art- and design-based research experiments
• Neelakantan Keshavan: In the thickness of things: Grounding/Grounded ways of thinking through design

16.00-17.00:
Lively panel debate between the 4 presenters + dialogue with the audience

Bios:

Meghna Singh is an artist and researcher with a PhD in visual anthropology from the University of Cape Town, a Fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab 2023-2024, an honorary fellow at Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery & Emancipation. Her work focuses on themes of human migration, globalization & critical mobilities, immersive experiences within public art and the decolonization of the digital. Working with video installation, sculpture and XR, blurring boundaries between documentary and fiction she creates immersive environments highlighting issues of ‘humanism’ through the tool of the imaginary.

Oda-Kange Midtvåge Diallo (she/her) is a black feminist working with practices of ‘black study’, a non-disciplinary, collaborative, and embodied mode of knowledge creation, among African diaspora youth in the Nordics. Oda-Kange holds a Master’s in Anthropology and a PhD in Gender Studies. As a Fulani, Norwegian, and Danish person, she thinks with, from, and against the materialities of Nordic colonialisms and the nation state.  Oda-Kange’s work is always anchored in collaborative, queer, black feminist, and anticolonial pedagogies.

Marie Koldkjær Højlund is Associate Professor of Sound Studies at Audio Design, Aarhus University, Denmark. PhD in Audio Design with a dissertation about sound and noise in Danish Hospitals entitled “Overhearing - An Attuning Approach to Noise in Danish Hospitals” (2017). Marie is an active sound artist and composer and a part of the band Kh Marie & Nephew. During her work she has been engaged in designing sound environments and installations for various public spaces and hospitals, including the Aarhus 2017 European Capital of Culture project The Overheard.

Neelakantan Keshavan teaches at the Department of Design at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, a design school housed within a technical institute in Hyderabad, India. He is keen on Design as the cultivation, preservation, and proliferation of difference and heterogeneity. His research areas are visual and spatial culture, design as a discourse of visions, and architecture as an active search for being at home.